But across a wide swath of major publishers, results have been
uniformly weak. “The revenue in no way backed up the amount of
time that was being spent on it,” says Jason Kint, CEO of
Digital Content Next. DCN is a trade group that represents many
large publishers, including NBC, The New York Times, Conde Nast,
ESPN, Slate, Business Insider, and Vox Media. (Vox Media owns
The Verge.)

At the end of last year, DCN surveyed its members on the financial
performance of content published to third-party platforms
including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Google’s AMP project.
It found that not one publisher reported earning more money
through Instant Articles than they did through their own
properties. “We make less money on Instant Articles than we do on
mobile web, which is probably everyone’s experience,” said Bill
Carey, director of audience development at Slate. And while
Facebook reported that publishers using Instant Articles saw
readers consuming 25 percent more content, most DCN members had
seen no such increase.